Comic Art Friday: Grass queen

It’s no secret that my comic art collection focuses primarily on characters in the superhero genre. When it comes to reading, however, I’ve always enjoyed a broad range of comics — everything from Conan the Barbarian to Josie and the Pussycats.

One of my current jams is a series from BOOM! Studios called Grass Kings, written by Matt Kindt, and illustrated in pencils and watercolors by Tyler Jenkins. It’s difficult to describe what Grass Kings is about. In terms of genre, I suppose you could classify it as a mystery or suspense thriller, wrapped tightly in character drama. Tonally, it’s sort of like Twin Peaks meets The Walking Dead, only without the psycho-supernatural weirdness of the former or the zombies of the latter.

The series tells the story of a trailer-park community in the middle of the Western prairie (the “grass” of the title) that has set itself up as a more-or-less self-sufficient outpost of civilization under the leadership of three brothers (the “kings”). The inhabitants of the Grass Kingdom strive to avoid interaction with the outside world at all costs… until circumstances make that impossible.

Regular artist Jenkins contributes the cover art as well as the interiors. As is the way of things in the present-day comics world, however, most of the issues have been released with variant covers available as retailer premiums. When I talked with Ryan Sook at Silicon Valley Comic Con a few months back, I learned that he had just completed the variant cover for the then-upcoming Grass Kings #3. I was thrilled to score Ryan’s preliminary sketch for this cover, which appears below, along with the finished art as published.

There’s a tiny niche gallery in my collection entitled Pin-Ups With Pistols (a spin on the Tommy Shaw 1984 album title song Girls With Guns) where this sketch fits perfectly. It’s a callback to all those noir films — and the femmes fatale who starred in them — before which I sat transfixed in my youth. They sure don’t make ’em like that any more.